Currently, public transport stations, schools, gyms, swimming pools and sport facilities in general are equipped with lockers for users to temporarily keep their personal items. Each locker is provided with an independent lock or locking system, which controls the opening and closing of the locker. The locking systems can be merely mechanical (actuated by means of a key) or electronical (activated, for example, by means of a keypad or an RFID tag).
Regarding lockers fitted with electronic locks, in most cases said locking systems are not connected to any central control unit, but they feature an individual and isolated behaviour instead. Power for the electronic components of these locking systems can be wire-supplied or supplied locally by using a battery in each electronic lock.
In case of a wired power supply, one or more supply wires in the location where the lockers are placed, serve to supply all and each of the electronic locks in the facility at all times, with the advantage of avoiding supply problems except for cases of a general failure in the supply system of the facility or an unlikely fault in any of the supply wires. However, it has the inconvenience that, once the piece of furniture is manufactured, it is difficult for it to be adapted, to create slots or grooves thereon to hide the wiring. If this is not accurately performed, the material left by the user inside the locker can damage the facility. Furthermore, this requires the wires to be distributed all over the facility so as to reach each and every locker, something which is often very expensive and not very feasible depending on where these are to be located.
To avoid the difficult and complicated process of wire supplying each of the lockers in the facility, the chosen option in many cases is to supply the electronic locking systems individually by means of batteries. This forces to individually monitor the charge level of each battery so as to replace it in time before it runs out, which can be complicated and inefficient in facilities having a great amount of lockers.
In other cases the lockers in the facility may be part of a system controlled by a central unit, which allows remote control and configuration of the lockers. In some cases, the locker system is controlled by one or several local units, which are in turn usually connected to a central unit. For example, in some gyms a local unit controls the locking of up to 32 lockers from a display, there being as many displays as blocks of 32 lockers. In these systems centralized systems the electronic locks of the lockers are wire supplied and communicated with the central or local unit also wirelessly. These locker systems do not have power supply problems, since they are wire supplied, and can be managed remotely by the central unit. However, they still have the disadvantage of requiring a costly, and frequently complicated, installation of the supply wires and the communication wires with the central unit.
In the current locker systems featuring centralized control, batteries are not used to supply the locking systems as this is not a practical solution, since the power consumed by the electronic lock operation itself and by the wireless communication with the central unit would force a battery replacement every few days, which makes this option non-viable. These locker systems featuring a centralized control only work “online”, being the lockers unable to work in offline mode in case of a failure in the centralized supply and/or in the central unit.
The electronic lock and electronic locking system for the lockers of the present invention solve the above mentioned problem, with power being supplied to the lockers by means of batteries and operation of the lockers being either an offline operation or operation managed by a central unit, having a minimum consumption which makes it possible for the batteries to last for more than two years under normal use conditions.